Industrial Workers of the World

The Golden Mile

The members of the ruling class such as mining magnates, bishops, pliticians of all parties, and other immoral persons point to the Golden Mile of W.A. The Golden Mile is Hell: the Hell of capitalism, the effect of a dying and rotten social system, based on ignorance and false ideals. There in unemployment on the Golden Mile.

There is poverty on the Golden Mile. Men die early, are worked to death, maimed, and the fine dust cuts the lungs of miners on the Golden Mile.

The huge ugly dumps that disfigure the landscape and fill the workers homes with fine dust, represent so much poverty, misery, sordidness, crushed hopes and Dividends on the Golden Mile.

The mines and social system of the Golden Mile denote a very low state of civilisation; all the features of capitalism are there. An ignorant and misled working class, preyed upon by curruptedly interested persons, such as blatant politicians, tricked into time agreements by servile union leaders, and kept unthinking by all the forces of capitalism, the Law, the State, and the Church.

The contract system in the mines is killing more men than the Government Sanatorium or the miners' releief fund can cope with. Speeding up is a science; the truckers and the shovelers are their own taskmasters, who have to fill in a card called a "Plod," giving details of work done. If the work done does not reach the task set, the bogger is fired.

Yet there is hope at the Golden Mile. Life without hope, what then ! Our only hope is knowledge. Knowledge of life, the universe and some of its laws called science. We live in a world of change; everything changes from stars to unions, this change is an orderly change, not haphazard, not just by chance, but by law.

This law is called evolution. Evolution is action and reaction, is building and destroying, and of cause and effect. Evolution is a universal doctrine and its logical conclusion is the unity of all things, in other words the unity of consciousness.

"Thou can'st not stir a flower"
"Without troubling a star."

The first and most immediate lesson that evolution is going to, and is, teaching on teh Golden Mile, is the unity of the entire working class of the world.

The workers built up labor organisations, now these organisations will have to be destroyed and flung aside. The old craft unions have been the effect of a certain standard of intelligence, and now by the impotence of craft unionism in the class struggle it will be the cause of making plain to the workers, the need for the One Big Union.

Cause and effect is in all things. The logic of events on the Golden Mile, in fact all over the world, is making the workers see that they must combine with fellow workers of all the world.

Craft unionism took some trouble to build up, now it has to be destroyed.

Capitalism has taken millions of years and lives to reach its conclusion and now it has to be destroyed and replaced by by a social system based on a wider, deeper and truer idea of the Universe.

The more intelligent the workers are the more consciously they will struggle. Capitalism on the Golden Mile cannot escape its fate - for evolution is universal, and the germ of the new society, the I.W.W., isd here to destroy capitalism and its prop craft unionism.

Mike Sawtell Direct Action 1 February 1915